Overview
SPO Japan Guild (SJG) is a Japanese-language community for Cardano stake pool operators, founded to promote network decentralization and help non-English speakers set up and run stake pools. It operates as one of the larger regional stake pool alliances in the Cardano ecosystem.
The guild supports operators across their full journey — from first node install to governance participation — through a Japanese technical manual, a Discord workspace, and recurring live meetings. Membership is free, and the community treats non-engineers as a core audience rather than an afterthought1.
Key Features
- Japanese SPO setup manual. Continuously maintained documentation covers cardano-node and cardano-cli installation, air-gapped key management, pool registration, monitoring, and server specification, with the latest manual version tracked against specific node releases2.
- Live operator support. A Discord community gives new and existing operators direct access to working SPOs for questions on node maintenance, protocol parameter changes, and Ubuntu security — a channel structured around active peer review rather than ticketed support.
- Recurring SPO meetings. A long-running weekly meeting cadence produces public minutes archived on the site, creating a searchable record of technical decisions, node upgrade verification, and community discussion over multiple years.
- Project Catalyst funded operations. The guild has secured funding across several rounds of Project Catalyst, including Fund 10 and Fund 13, to sustain documentation maintenance, run community meetings, and develop open-source SPO tooling released under the MIT License3.
- Community-built tooling. Contributors have produced Japanese-localized operator tools such as a TUI-based stake pool setup utility and a block-leader notification service, distributed through the guild's public GitHub organization.
What to Expect
New operators arriving at SPO Japan Guild encounter a structured path rather than a loose chat. The documentation site walks through server requirements, operating system choices, node and CLI installation, key management in an air-gapped environment, and pool registration, with explicit cost and reward breakdowns for planning.
Active operators use the guild as a technical reference and coordination layer. Manual updates track cardano-node release candidates, and meeting minutes provide context on why specific configurations or upgrade steps were chosen. The guild explicitly declines to recommend specific VPS providers, framing that choice as a decentralization concern for operators to decide individually.
Delegators and observers can inspect the SPO Japan Guild pool list and linked pool data to verify active participation on-chain. The broader content is written in Japanese, so English readers may rely on automated translation, though the underlying technical artifacts — GitHub repositories, config snippets, and node version references — are language-neutral and usable directly. For a broader Cardano context on delegation mechanics, see adastack's staking guides.
